“A great force of suffering accumulated between
the basement of heaven and the roof of hell...”

Zora
Neale Hurston wrote those words almost seventy years ago at
the beginning of her great allegorical work on black America,
Moses,
Man of the Mountain. She could have been speaking about African
America today. As black activists ponder how best to build a mass
movement to transform America, a mass movement that must start
in but not be confined to our communities, one single low-hanging
fruit of organizing opportunity is hard to miss. That opportunity
lies in the manifest unfairness and hypocrisy of America’s system
of racially selective policing, prosecution and mass imprisonment.
These awful public policies are inviting targets for electoral
and other mobilizations in black communities and beyond.

The fact that America does implement a public policy
of racially selective mass imprisonment is well documented and
beyond dispute. With under 5 percent of the world’s people, the
US accounts for 25 percent of the planet’s prisoners. More than
half its 2.2 million prisoners come from the one eighth of its
population which is black. Today, an astounding 3 percent of
all African Americans languish in prisons and jails, and nearly
as many more are on probation, parole, bail, house arrest or court
supervision. Tens of thousands of jobless, skill-less, often
anti-socialized inmates are released into black communities each
month in which jobs, medical care, educational opportunities and
family or official support are almost completely absent. Unsurprisingly,
many are back behind the walls in a matter of months. Right now,
the shadow of prison squats at the corners of, and often at the
center of nearly every black family’s life in this nation.

Since 1970, the US prison population has multiplied
more than six times. The explosive growth of America's incarceration
and crime control industries have occurred despite essentially
level crime rates over the last four decades. This has only been
possible because the public policies which enable and support
locking up more people longer and for less have until now been
exempt from analyses of their human, economic and social costs
or any reckoning of the relationships of spiraling imprisonment
to actual crime rates or public safety. Most tellingly, while
public discussions of these policies are deracialized, their racially
disparate impacts are a seldom discussed but widely known fact.
Thus even though the damning numbers are widely reported and well
known, mass incarceration is practically invisible as a political
issue, even in those heavily black communities which suffer most
from its implementation.

Making mass incarceration a political issue

In the absence of an independent, adversarial press,
which might be willing to raise issues on its own and educate
the public, US political discourse is limited to what officeholders
and candidates say and what the media chooses to report about
what they say. As long as no candidate or official can be heard
calling for a moratorium on the prosecution of juveniles as adults,
it is a non-issue. If no candidate or official is cited in the
media advocating the extension of health care, job and educational
opportunities or the rights of citizenship to the prisoner class
such proposals are absolutely off the table. And unless some
candidates or officials somehow get ink or air time publicly questioning
the economic and social effects of mass incarceration on children,
on families, on whole communities, these concerns remain politically
invisible.

The fact that sizeable chunks of the population,
including likely majorities in constituencies with large numbers
of African Americans might support radical reforms of America’s
racially skewed policing, prosecutorial and sentencing practices,
if anybody would ask them, is irrelevant. The establishment political
consensus and media lockdown assure that no section of the public
will ever be asked such questions, and hence will never know how
widely shared their own views on the clear injustice of these
policies are.

If we are to build a mass movement in opposition
to America’s crime control and prison industries, we must succeed
in putting the facts of racially selective mass incarceration,
impoverishment and criminalization, first, in front of our African
American communities, and then before the whole of America, and
do so effectively, persuasively, consistently and persistently.
America must be forced to publicly unpack and examine the myths
that have justified its incarceration binge. An indispensable
tactic in this struggle must be the mounting of competent, effective
campaigns for elected office which directly question the unfairness,
along with the social and human costs of these policies, political
campaigns which propose radical and understandable measures to
shrink the “crime control” and prison industries rather than expand
them, and to ameliorate some of the harm already done to families
and communities.

A short list of such down-to-earth public policy
proposals might include, but not be limited to the following:

A moratorium on the prosecution of juveniles as
adults, and the confinement of juveniles in facilities with
adult inmates.

A moratorium on all privatization of prisons and
jails, including piecemeal privatizations of such services as
inmate feeding, medical care and probation.

Repeal or sunset of all “two-strikes”, “three
strikes” and indeterminate sentencing legislation.

The imposition of mandatory ethnic and racial
impact statements for all future prison construction and sentencing
legislation, with a period set for mandatory review comparing
the statement at outset with the results no less than four years
out.

Elimination of sentencing disparities between
powdered cocaine and crack.

End felony disenfranchisement in those states
where it exists, perhaps with a constitutional amendment guaranteeing
voting as a right.

Repeal of legislation banning Pell Grants to convicted
felons and inmates, and require states to offer college credit
courses to inmates who have completed their GED or the equivalent.

Refocus parole systems upon the re-entry and productive
reintegration of former prisoners into society rather than re-imprisonment.

Explicit commitments to reduce and eliminate disparities
in prosecution and imprisonment.

Over the next several months we should refine and
expand the list of policy positions that campaigns must incorporate
if they expect the support of a mass movement to end the nation’s
policy of racially selective imprisonment.

Organic connections between electoral campaigns
and mass movements

In BC’s June
30, 2005 issue we described some of the essential characteristics
of mass movements, progressive and otherwise:

“Politicians are elected and selected, but mass
movements transform societies. Judges uphold, strike down,
or invent brand new law, but mass movements drag the courts,
laws and officeholders all in their wake. Progressive
and even partially successful mass movements can alter the political
calculus for decades to come, thus improving the lives of millions….

”Mass movements exist outside electoral politics,
and outside the law, or they don’t exist at all. Mass
movements are never respecters of law and order. How can
they be? A mass movement is an assertion of popular leadership
by the people themselves. A mass movement aims to persuade
courts, politicians and other actors to tail behind it, not
the other way around. ”

There are already many serious people in our communities
involved in churches and voluntary organizations that try their
best to offer services to the families of inmates, that lobby
and agitate against drug and incarceration policies, that attempt
to offer counseling and re-entry services to those emerging from
our state and federal gulag. An electoral campaign and a mass
movement is an unparalleled opportunity for grandmothers in church-sponsored
re-entry programs to work with unchurched young people who know
that they, their siblings and classmates are destined to be fodder
for the imprisonment industry if things don’t turn around. If
that isn’t a formula that can feed a mass movement, no such thing
exists. Electoral campaigns conducted against the crime control
industry are an indispensable tool in extending a movement’s outreach.

Still, we must not allow ourselves to become confused
about the differences between a mass movement to change America's
policy of selective policing and racist incarceration, and an
electoral campaign, even ones that succeed in putting the issue
of mass imprisonment at its center. Unlike a mass movement, a
political campaign is a decorous, time-limited legal exercise.
We must know that political campaigns have often heralded the
demobilization of a mass movement, even when that movement’s objectives
have not been met. Being able to use electoral campaigns to advance
the agenda of a mass movement demands prior preparation and steadfast
resolve, lest the candidate before or after election stray from
within the bright lines of opposing the incarceration of juveniles
as adults, or demanding racial and ethnic impact statements and
evaluation for sentencing legislation, to use two of several possible
examples.

The culture of campaigns and officialdom as practiced
in America today makes officeholders unaccountable to anyone except
corporate cash and corporate media. Hence it is suicidal for
the leaders of local movements to wait for candidates to emerge
and then decide which if any to support. Candidates that surface
without the help of a movement against mass incarceration will
have intended all along to run whether such a movement existed
or not, and should hence be shunned. Local “movement leaders,”
forced to choose among such a crop, will inevitably choose the
“least worst” candidate, who will offer only tepid support to
a movement’s “bright line” issues and will not advance the cause
of de-legitimizing our nation’s racially skewed crime control
industry at all.

To guarantee that political campaigns endorsed by
the movement do indeed advance the cause, over the individual
fortunes and pressures to which candidates are prey, we must set
up local, statewide and even regional screening committees to
recruit and interview suitable candidates for office, and to facilitate
the channeling of funds and campaign expertise to those who pledge
to stay within the bright lines and place the issue of mass incarceration
squarely at the center of their campaigns. A national PAC
whose sole purpose is funding movement-vetted candidates running
against mass imprisonment – and other “bright line issues – should
be one of the outcomes of our next national dialogue, now commonly
referred to as “going
back to Gary.” The gathering will occur in the first quarter
of next year.

Candidates who run against the crime control industry
and racist mass imprisonment will certainly need all the help
they can get. Although they are likely to receive surprising
support and attract tons of youthful talent and enthusiasm in
our base communities, they will face formidable odds getting their
message out through an indifferent or hostile media. Time-tested
best practices like accountable voter registration drives, accurate
phone and door to door canvasses in base areas, and competent
Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) practices will have to be combined with
newer innovations to circumvent the monopoly that corporate media
have on access to the American public, including the black public.
BC will explore the impact of some of these new
media tactics and tools in an upcoming article.

Targeting local prosecutors and sheriffs

Federal prosecutors are presidential appointees.
But the state level gatekeepers for the prison industry’s stream
of human raw material are local prosecutors – elected officials
who must run for office at the level of counties, cities and judicial
circuits. A number of these jurisdictions have black majorities.
The local politicians with responsibility for housing pre-trial
inmates are usually elected county officials too: sheriffs.

The table below, which arranges the list of US counties
to show those with the top 130 black populations, shows a target-rich
environment, with fully 37 jurisdictions having African American
population percentages of 30% or greater. Every major city in
the state of Georgia, for instance, is on the list, including
3 of the 4 largest counties in metro Atlanta. And you don’t need
a black majority to run against mass imprisonment and win. A
black prosecutor ran against the Rockefeller drug laws in Albany
NY, where African Americans are a distinct minority – and won.

Crime control policies on every level in the U.S.
are based upon racist myths. Myths are powerful because they
are never questioned, never examined, never unpacked. Nobody
disputes that Justice Department data going back decades shows
rates of drug use among blacks and whites to be about the same.
A combination of white racism and a willingness to ignore unpleasant
facts largely account for white indifference at the disparity
between white and black rates of arrest and prosecution for offenses
created with equal frequency by both groups. But black support
for an industry and for public policies that criminalize a third
of all young black men, which disrupt and retard the formation
of strong families, and cripple workforce and educational opportunities
for such a broad cross section of us, is at best ambivalent and
at worst paper-thin, even among African Americans working in the
industry, based as it is upon a tenuous mass acceptance that this
is all somehow part of the normal balance of society.

“It’s hot in the summer,” we tell ourselves, “it’s
cold in the winter, and a third of all young black men are in
and out of jail.” Or we say “It’s a trap! It was out there waitin’
for them and they fell in it!” Both these positions are understandable
as mental adjustments much like those that some of our forbears
thought they had to make to get along in the world of triumphant
Jim Crow and white terror eighty or a hundred years ago. Such
views are uncomfortable for the black people that hold them, and
unstable. We must engage them by depicting mass incarceration
not as the way normal societies behave, but as a failed experiment
that punishes our entire community, a malevolent social policy
that can be challenged and must be changed.

Our language must be carefully constructed to aid
in the process of demythologizing crime and crime control policies.
We need new terminology, new language that better enables people
to grasp the issues around mass imprisonment and the criminal
justice industry as malevolent social policies which can be changed,
rather than unalterable facts like cold in the winter and heat
in the summer. For example, the terms “criminal justice system”
and “corrections” ought to be replaced in all our dialogue with
terms like “crime control industry”, or “imprisonment industry.”
A “system” is a very generalized term that does not tell us much,
while an “industry” is a very specific kind of system. To call
it an “industry” instead raises powerful questions of profit and
accountability which are obscured when we call it anything else.

White establishment pundits and politicians of a
generation ago warned us. They predicted the coming of what they
called a “white backlash.” This was their name for a predicted
white racist response to the just demands of African America for
equality of opportunity and economic justice advanced by the movement
of the 1960s, a response some feared would entrench racial inequality
and privilege deeper than ever before. They were right. Beginning
in the 1970s the selective mass
imprisonment of African Americans helped to swell the six
or sevenfold expansion of the prison population. And while the
rhetoric and official policies that enabled this were ostensibly
race-neutral, the results were an open secret. Around the same
time, Dr. King was saying that the movement which would save the
nation’s soul would have to emerge from black America. He was
right too.

The struggle to de-legitimize the racist crime control
and prison industries are at the heart of this generation's struggle
to de-legitimize racism itself. America’s policies of racially
selective policing, prosecution and imprisonment are the first
target for a mass movement which must emerge from our communities,
but which must not be confined to them. Laying the intelligent
groundwork for such a movement remains the task before us, when
we go back to Gary.